More Bad News for HD-DVD. Now Paramount?

Just days ago, it was announced that Warner Brothers was officially dropping HD-DVD and focusing exclusively on Blu-Ray. With such a big company picking Blu-Ray, it begs the question whether HD-DVD is on it’s way to the deadpool. Paramount and Universal, though, were still on the HD-DVD bandwagon.

Now it appears Paramount may be making the switch to Blu-Ray as well, according to a story in the Financial Times.

The story says that Paramount had a clause in their contract with HD-DVD which allows them to switch teams in the event that Warner ever did. Now that that has occurred, Paramount is exercising that clause and following Warner out of HD-DVD’s door.

The switch of Warner put about 70% of Hollywood’s DVD output into the Blu-Ray camp. With Paramount making the move, this will increase.

While some would think this would be cork opening time for the Blu-Ray guys at Sony, the chief executive over there is offering a more humble tone. He says Sony still has a lot of work to do to make Blu-Ray widely accepted, and that he is open to dialogue with the rival HD-DVD camp to “grow the market”.

This has been a few bad days for HD-DVD, and these moves are significant enough that we may indeed see an end to the format war after all. Needless to say, I wouldn’t be making any investments into HD-DVD anytime soon.